When I went out into the garden this morning, I could see evidence of the seasons changing. The past week has been a tad cooler, especially overnight; it rained all weekend, but today has reverted back to summer weather.

Regardless of the warmer day, the roses in particular have decided it’s time to prepare to bid summer farewell. New growth has slowed, the rose bushes are less lush than they have been, and some seem to have given up producing new buds. Others, however, are putting on a final display before going dormant for a short period.

I still hold out hope for another vase or two of roses before winter arrives, but for today at least, my vases for Cathy’s regular Monday meme at Rambling in the Garden just had to be all about the roses, just in case the weather turns cooler again.

My David Austin rose bush, Olivia Rose Austin, has grown some beauties during the past week, as has my Roald Dahl. The star of the garden this week, however, is Desdemona. She has several clusters of both open blooms and tiny buds, so I chose several to bring indoors. Desdemona has only been in my garden since last spring, yet she already seems very happy and has continually flowered right throughout the hottest months of the year.

Sadly, because the heat has affected some of the rose blooms, the petals will begin to drop within a couple of days. At least I have plenty of photos to look back on during winter, when my rose bushes are bare.

The gerberas are still flowering, so I brought in all of the fully formed flowers to add to the pink vase. Last week, the gerberas reminded me of Happy Shining People – this week’s photo looks like Fireworks! ~~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAWuBSq8rLc

The pink roses vase is now in the formal lounge room at the front of the house. After gardening in the heat this morning, when I began to trim back a few leafless rose branches to get a head-start on winter pruning, it took a while for me to cool down again, even after several glasses of water and a shower. Once my body temp was back to normal, I enjoyed a cup of tea and read a chapter of a book while sitting beside the pink roses vase.

In another vase, I arranged the Roald Dahl roses with several stems on Society Garlic. They have such pretty flowers when clustered together in a vase.

And the Roald Dahl roses vase is in the main thoroughfare of the house. If I don’t have a vase of flowers on this stand nowadays, it feels like there’s something missing from the room!

My final, tiny vase, containing oddments of a Love Potion mauve rose and a couple of short stems of Roald Dahl and Lavender is beside my desk.

Just a side-note – even using WordPress Reader to comment, I am noticing some of my comments are still not showing up! So if you see that I have “liked” your post, please check your spam comments to see if that is where my comment has gone. This ongoing commenting issue is extremely frustrating, to say the least. I only follow blogs that I enjoy reading, so being unable to communicate with my blogging friends at random times has become quite disheartening. So if you don’t mind persevering and searching for my wayward comments, I am hopeful that the problem will rectify itself in time. Fingers and toes crossed!

Meanwhile, don’t forget to visit Cathy to admire her Monday vase post; her garden in the UK is breaking out in beautiful springtime blooms! 🙂